Obsessed: America's Food Addiction

by Mika Brzezinski

  I’m also really interested in some of the ideas being discussed in urban-planning circles about designing communities for health. We should be thinking more about getting sidewalks throughout our towns and cities, providing safe parks that are easy to get to, and locating schools and businesses within an easy bike ride from residential neighborhoods.

  Oklahoma City mayor Mick Cornett emphasized those kinds of strategies at the same time he put his entire city on a diet.

  Cornett began his effort in 2005, truly the best of times and the worst of times for his city. Back then, Oklahoma City was getting some attention and respect, showing up on lists like “Best Places to Get a Job” and “Best Places to Start a Business.” But that same year, Men’s Fitness magazine published a list of America’s fattest cities, and Oklahoma City was right near the top.

  “It embarrassed me,” recalls Cornett. He was even more embarrassed when he went to a health information website, typed in his height and weight, and discovered that he qualified as obese. “It took that website to point out that I was a part of the problem,” he admits.

  The mayor’s first step toward solving it was to put himself on a diet. Then he persuaded a private donor to fund a health initiative, beginning with a website, thiscityisgoingonadiet.com, which offered everything from diet tips and shared journals to corporate challenges and exercise opportunities. Cornett called a news conference at the zoo, stood in front of the elephants and declared to residents, “We’re going to lose a million pounds.”

  We’re going to lose a million pounds.

  —Oklahoma City mayor Mick Cornett

  Forty-seven thousand people signed up, and five years later the city had reached its goal of one million pounds. It was a remarkable accomplishment. What made it work?

  For starters, Cornett took a leading role in the conversation and talked about his own story first. If he was going to put his city on a diet, he knew he would have to be honest about himself in the process. “I had to become comfortable talking about weight loss, how personal it is, how sensitive it is, how difficult it is, and my own lifelong struggles to keep my weight off.”

  Once Cornett went public with his story, it was as if a light had been flicked on across Oklahoma City. Suddenly, obesity was “okay to talk about at the dinner table and okay to talk about over the backyard fence and at the water cooler at work and at church,” he says. “Seemingly overnight, people were willing to talk about obesity for the very first time in this community.”

  The mayor did a lot more than talk. Cornett realized that like much of America, his city was ruled by the automobile. So he gathered city planners and asked them to reinvent the city; instead of catering to cars, he wanted to focus on people. As a result, he says, “We’re putting brand-new gymnasiums in all forty-five of the inner-city grade schools; we’re building health and wellness centers throughout the community for seniors; we’re completing our bicycle trail master plan; we’re putting in new sidewalks throughout the community; we’re putting in a downtown streetcar system to get a head start on mass transit. We are designing a city that revolves around people and pedestrians.”

  The restaurant industry has embraced the cause, too. Chefs began offering low-fat options on their menus, and the fast-food industry now advertises its healthier meals and tells consumers how to make better choices.

  Even with such a comprehensive approach, the mayor estimates it will take ten years to completely change the city’s culture from one that fosters obesity to one that fosters health and wellness. But the payoff has already started. Oklahoma City is now on the Men’s Fitness list of fittest cities in America, and the mayor says the changes in the environment have attracted an influx of highly educated twenty-somethings. Jobs have followed. A recent study named Oklahoma City the most entrepreneurial city in the country, with the most start-ups per capita, the lowest unemployment in the United States, and what Cornett calls “a boom economy.”4

  I totally agree with the advice Cornett offers other government leaders who want to emulate his success. “Most elected officials don’t want to preach the message of what you eat and how much you eat because it seems invasive. Many government initiatives on obesity fail because they end up becoming just exercise programs. That shouldn’t just be a message for overweight people; that ought to be a message for everybody. I think it’s wrong to suggest that obese people can just exercise their way out of obesity. It’s about what you eat and how much you eat, and we have not run from that message.”

  New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is another public figure who thinks that government has a really important role to play in turning back the tide of obesity. He’s my hero because he has gotten out there, ignited a conversation, and has even been sued as he pushes to make this issue a priority.

  Under his watch, New York City began requiring chain restaurants with more than fifteen locations to post the calorie counts of their food. At least twenty other cities have followed his example since the law went into effect in 2008. New York also banned trans fat, a solid fat that is a leading cause of heart disease. Other municipalities picked up on that idea, too, and after the ball got rolling McDonald’s and some of the other fast-food chains decided to eliminate trans fat from all their outlets nationwide.

  Bloomberg also called on the New York State legislature to impose a tax on soda. That failed to pass, but public health officials and researchers say it would have a meaningful effect on how much soda we drink, and I’d like to see other elected officials take up the issue.

  The mayor’s latest accomplishment was to ban sales of soda and other sugary drinks in containers larger than sixteen ounces in restaurants, movie theaters, sports stadiums, and other entertainment venues. The soft-drink industry, joined by other business groups, sued to halt that regulation in October 2012.

  I really admire the example Mayor Bloomberg is setting because politicians just have to make this a priority. Some people accuse me of calling for a “Nanny State” by welcoming the government into our supermarkets and restaurants and now, with my support for the large-size soda ban, even movie theaters. But I contend that the government already plays a real big role in how we eat, especially through the massive subsidies it provides to big agriculture. So it is not a new idea to involve government, it’s just a matter of changing the way we involve it.

  “The fact is, we already have the nanny state, because we’ve already been told what to eat by the food industry,” points out Dr. Robert Lustig, the pediatric endocrinologist who has called sugar a toxic ingredient. “If you ask me, we’d be better off with a nanny state that has public health, not private profit, as its motive.”

  We already have the nanny state, because we’ve already been told what to eat by the food industry . . . we’d be better off with a nanny state that has public health, not private profit, as its motive.

  —Robert Lustig

  I think the federal government can do a lot more to join the conversation, and to demonstrate the leadership and political will to change some of the policies that promote obesity. We should all be pushing our elected officials to act.

  Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor, and Donny Deutsch were on Morning Joe one day, and as we were chatting afterward, Donny said, “Can you imagine if we could eradicate obesity? Everything else would follow. Our health care costs would go down, and our health in general would be better. Everything would change in this country.”

  Can you imagine if we could eradicate obesity? . . . Our health care costs would go down, and our health in general would be better. Everything would change in this country.—Donny Deutsch

  He’s right, which is why obesity needs to be at the top of the agenda in Washington. I challenge our politicians to explain why it isn’t. Someday soon, instead of saying “economy, economy, economy” we need to start saying “obesity, obesity, obesity.” We’ve got to. Because, as Senator Claire McCaskill points out, the two issues are so closely tied together. “It would be a relative
ly painless way for our country to soar with a completely sound fiscal footing if we could put a dent in this increasing epidemic of us eating cheap food in portions that could strangle a horse,” she says. “Making that food primary in our diets is going to break our country if we’re not careful.”

  One thing our public officials can do is use the bully pulpit, just as First Lady Michelle Obama has with her “Let’s Move” campaign, which is dedicated to ending childhood obesity. Her initiative includes commonsense strategies to educate parents, provide healthier food in schools, help children become more active, and make sure all families have access to healthy, affordable food.

  I believe we also urgently need to change the nation’s farm policy, especially the agricultural supports that make processed food much less expensive than most fresh foods. Robert Lustig maintains that our current approach to crop subsidies makes sweeteners so inexpensive that “80 percent of the food items that are available in the US food supply are currently laced with sugar.”

  With a lot of research indicating that sugar can make us sick, Lustig says the government winds up paying twice.

  “The government paying for food subsidies is, number one, breaking the bank. We don’t need these subsidies. We don’t have the Dust Bowl. We don’t have farmers who are in trouble. We don’t have a hungry population that needs dried, storable food. Number two, all the disease that comes of it, the government ends up paying for in the form of Medicare and Medicaid. So no wonder Medicare is going broke.”

  Meanwhile, average Americans find it harder to afford a healthy diet of fresh fruits and vegetables, and schools struggle to find the funds to comply with new federal nutritional standards. That tells me we should think more about how government can help make good food less costly than bad food. As Dr. Zeke Emanuel says, “We’re not going to be able to raise the cost of school lunches that much, given budget realities, and so we’ve got to think about how we can bring the price of the healthier food components down.”

  A lot of people tell me we can do that by overhauling the Farm Bill, which is the key federal legislation guiding agricultural policies in this country. Instead of rewarding huge mega-farms, we should be giving more support to smaller farms, especially organic ones that supply local food networks with fruits and vegetables. If we want families to eat better food, that’s where we should be spending public dollars.

  I’m very encouraged to have Senator Kirsten Gillibrand sitting on the Agriculture Committee, the first representative from New York in forty years. She takes a vastly different approach toward food issues than senators who hail from states that produce commodity crops, especially corn, soybeans, and rice. I am with her all the way.

  Gillibrand says she wants to “create a framework that’s focused on having safety nets or insurance for farmers when they go through a storm or a bad weather condition that takes a toll on crops. What we’re also hoping to do is enhance programs that are ‘farm to fork,’ getting whole foods directly into our public schools.”

  As a mom and a policy maker, Senator Gillibrand is also backing the federal Healthy Foods Financing Initiative. I think that initiative is one of the most important tools for nourishing the 25 million people in America who live in areas known as “food deserts”; that is, inner-city neighborhoods, rural areas, and other communities where good-quality markets don’t exist and people don’t have easy access to fresh, healthy foods. This legislation would provide grants to help existing grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and food co-ops sell fruits and vegetables at affordable prices, and draw new food businesses into areas where they don’t currently exist.

  I also agree with the experts who say the government should require better labels on our food and more transparency in the industry so that people have a fuller understanding about what they are eating, and what it does to them. The US Food and Drug Administration is talking about revising the current label and requiring calorie counts to be posted more prominently. I also hope we will see more specific information about sugar content so we know just how much sugar is added to each serving of food. New York Times columnist Mark Bittman has another suggestion I like: put a traffic light logo on the label. A green light would be for food you can eat all the time, a cautionary yellow light would describe foods you should eat only once in a while, and a red light would warn about food that should be avoided altogether.

  We also need to push our political leaders to get involved in refocusing the food industry. “We can’t all go back to hunting or trapping or growing our own food,” acknowledges Robert Lustig. Instead, “we need a new food system, one that works for the populace, one that doesn’t overfeed them, one that doesn’t cause significant chronic disease, and one that actually protects the environment. How is that going to happen when the only thing the food industry is interested in is making money?”

  The answer is that government has to pressure food businesses, and for that to happen, Americans need to pressure their government. It’s not a matter of what’s in the government’s best interest, it’s what’s in the best interest of the people.

  I think that legal action against the food industry is one of the ways we can bring about broader changes. As more conversation about the causes of obesity and disease takes place, and Americans become more educated about the food system, this is beginning to happen. Some of the same lawyers who went after the tobacco industry decades ago are now going after Big Food.

  “Fat and food have become the new tobacco,” says John Banzhaf, one of the first attorneys to take legal action against smoking in the mid-1960s. Banzhaf is a public interest law professor at George Washington University and founder of Action on Smoking and Health. “Those legal actions against smoking had a lot to do with changing the mind of the public. In the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, even early nineties, most people blamed smoking solely on the smoker. It was his fault, it was his bad choice, it was his lack of responsibility.”

  Fat and food have become the new tobacco.

  —John Banzhaf

  To me, that sounds very much like the way we have looked at obesity.

  Initially, nobody thought to lay blame for smoking on the tobacco industry. That began to shift, Banzhaf said, “as the revelations came out about how they promoted addiction, about how they lied, how they were underhanded. I think people began seeing that while personal responsibility plays a role, and people shouldn’t smoke, at least part of the responsibility lay with those who were promoting it.”

  Again, I see a parallel with obesity and the aggressive marketing of fast foods. Still another similarity is that anti-smoking measures began to take hold when we discovered how adversely nonsmokers were affected by secondhand smoke. Likewise, as we recognize how the costs of too much weight affect us all, in higher taxes and inflated health insurance premiums, for example—we also recognize that everyone has a stake in dealing with the problem.

  By mid-2012, twenty-five lawsuits had been filed against companies like ConAgra Foods, General Mills, and PepsiCo contending that they are mislabeling their products and thus misleading consumers.5 These high-profile cases have forced companies to change, especially companies that value their public image.

  “They are much more worried that this is going to hurt them than tobacco companies ever were,” Banzhaf says. “Tobacco companies already wear a very, very black hat. The food companies are reacting to the fact that we are beginning to place a black hat on them.”

  While the tobacco industry couldn’t make a less hazardous cigarette, the food industry has a wider range of possible responses. “When you sue the fast food companies they can do things. They are doing things,” Banzhaf says. “They are lowering the calorie count in some of their foods. They have introduced more nutritious entrees. They have provided increased disclosure of fats.”

  Walmart is one of the leaders here, reducing the salt and fat in some of the food they sell. “They’re the big gorilla, the single biggest grocery seller in the world,” said Zeke Eman
uel. “Their decision will first and foremost shape their private label, but after that it will also affect a lot of the other products they sell. And a lot of manufacturers are going to take the products that they’re selling at Walmart and distribute them more widely. So I’m strongly anticipating a very big effect throughout the manufactured-food industry.”

  Still, I wouldn’t expect the food industry to voluntarily make all the changes we need. The lawyers are still likely to have a role. And legal action will eventually lead to new statutes and regulations. “We will litigate until they legislate,” says Banzhaf. “In our country there have been quite a number of movements, including the civil rights movement, which started with litigation, because there was very little public support for significant change. The only way to begin the change, to kick down the door, to arouse public attention, and then get legislative attention was through lawsuits.”

  Here it might be helpful to identify some of the new statutes and regulations which have already been sparked by the fat law suits. For example, New York City and then California required the disclosure of calories in foods at many chain restaurants, including fast food ones, and this requirement will apply nationwide in 2014 as a result of the Obamacare statute. More than two dozen jurisdictions now have a tax on or aimed at sugary soft drinks. Many states followed the example triggered by litigation in New York City and are restricting what foods can be sold and/or even brought into schools. Some jurisdictions are prohibiting establishing fast food outlets within x number of yards of schools. And, of course, New York City has banned trans fats in foods and limited the sale of sugary soft drinks in movies and many other venues to only sixteen ounces.

  I say it’s time to declare war on obesity. I know it is not going to be easy to win, as Nancy Snyderman explains. “Never before has the human race been threatened by a profound overabundance of food,” she says. “Cheap, affordable, toxic food that coincides with a loss of American sidewalks, the raping of public schools and taking away gym classes, and a technological environment that invites people to do more by doing less. It’s the perfect storm of societal issues that I think will doom the next generation if we allow it.”